Welcome to this month's SSI Fellows Newsletter which shares activities and opportunities taking place within the SSI Fellows' community. Read on for:
- Fellows' Spotlight: Daniele Procida, Gemma Turon and Hannah Williams.
- November 2023 Community Call recap
- Actions for Fellows
- Fellows' and related activities
- Upcoming events and calls
Fellows’ Spotlight
Daniele Procida, Director of Engineering, Canonical
Updates from call
- This year I took my work on documentation https://diataxis.fr to data scientists in southern Africa (February) at PyCon Namibia. I also had a deeper research community encounter at FAIRmat in Berlin, where a colleague and I ran a two-day documentation workshop for the team behind NOMAD (this engagement continues).
- At other events, I spent time with SREs and others working on research software to discover their challenges. The theme that has emerged from the year is: the product model of software transfers well to research software, and seems to clarify its documentation problems effectively.
- Not only that, but the response I had to “Practices for quality at scale” workshops I’ve run this year suggest that pragmatic and lightweight methods to advance good engineering practice in general at the organisational level also seem to have value for research contexts.
My non-work highlight - I was part of the organisation of the first-ever DjangoCon Africa, which took place in Zanzibar in November. We started planning the conference in 2018, only to be derailed by successive global and regional events. The outcome was a huge success: 200 people gathered for six days, from 22 countries, and another step forward for open-source grassroots organisation in Africa.
My recommendations - I finally read the “new” (i.e. 2011) Bill Johnston translation of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. It’s still only available in digital editions, and far more lucid than the much earlier Polish to French to English translation. It must be the funniest novel about the history of science I’ve ever read. It’s also painfully sad (about human beings) and on the idea of the possibility of being able to understand non-human intelligence, still more deeply insightful than anything I’ve seen in the last year in the froth of conversation about LLMs.
Gemma Turon, Co-founder and CEO, Ersilia Open Source Initiative
Updates from call - The SSI Fellows call is a fantastic opportunity to reflect all the work done in the context of the Fellowship (whether it has been economically supported by the Fellowship or not). In the latest call, I presented briefly what our young non-profit organisation, Ersilia, is trying to achieve in the field of data science for infectious disease research. With the goal of reducing inequalities in global health, we are building a set of open-source Artificial Intelligence tools to support scientists working in low resourced settings. Thanks to a huge community effort, our main platform, the Ersilia Model Hub, now features over 120 AI models for drug discovery, and covers disease areas like malaria, tuberculosis, schistosomiasis and HIV.
My non-work highlight - I’ve started working on my solo circus act. As my side-job and long-time passion, I perform and teach aerial acrobatics. I have started working on my first long solo show, with the idea of premiering at the end of 2024!
My recommendations - The latest Cannes Palme d’Or awarded movie: Anatomy of a Fall
Gemma’s slides from the Fellows Community Call can be found here.
Hannah Williams, Research Software Engineer, Dstl (previously, and whilst completing fellowship activities, Mathematical Modeller, UKHSA)
Updates from call - During my fellowship period (2021) I worked with colleagues to establish a UKHSA-wide Software Community of Practice. This was a larger undertaking than my original proposal, but (hopefully) a more comprehensive forum to facilitate sharing and learning best practice and internal knowledge. We hosted seminars, coffee-and-coding, workshops and built a network for one-on-one support.
- Unexpected time-consuming activity: talking to people; ensuring that teams/individuals would support the community, and securing senior approval.
- Could have done better: measuring impact.
- Biggest mishap: collaborative documents going wrong.
- Highlight: the opportunity to learn from people (huge shout-out to the SSI Community Building study group)
My non-work highlight - A holiday (8 years in the pipeline) with a friend to Disney World Florida. It was even more than supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. The highlight of the trip was Fantasmic; a musical-pyrotechnic-laser-water show.
My recommendations - My go-to podcast for my commute is “It’s a Fair Cop” by Alfie Moore (available on BBC Sounds) – highly entertaining and informative insight into life as a police officer, giving the audience an opportunity to decide what course of action they would take if they were in Alfie’s shoes.
Hannah’s slides from the Fellows Community Call can be found here.
Community Call Recap
During the November 2023 SSI Fellows Community Call, we heard Fellows’ updates from Daniele Procida, Gemma Turon and Hannah Williams. In breakout rooms, we discussed dealing with management, RSE & Python (especially in LMIC), and handing over things.
Fellows’ and related activities
Collaborations Workshop 2024 - The Collaborations Workshop 2024 (CW24) will bring together researchers, developers, innovators, managers, funders, publishers, policy makers, leaders and educators to explore best practices and the future of research software. The themes of CW24 will be: Environmental Sustainability, AI/ML tools for science, Citizen science
- Date: 30 April - 2 May 2024
- Location: Scarman, University of Warwick
- Link: https://www.software.ac.uk/workshop/collaborations-workshop-2024-cw24
Upcoming events and calls
- RSE Conference 2024 - The eighth annual conference for Research Software Engineering will take place in Newcastle. See the link below for more details and submission deadlines.
- Date: 3-4 September 2024
- Location: Newcastle, England
- Link: https://rsecon24.society-rse.org/